Alan Borning’s research while affiliated with University of Mary Washington and other places

Over the past two decades, the business model of surveillance capitalism has emerged in the IT industry. This model has turned out to be highly profitable, but, if left unchecked, will very likely undermine the foundations of liberal democracies and quality of life on this planet. It involves customized advertising and behavior manipulation, powered by intensive gathering and cross-correlation of personal information. There are significant indirect costs of this model, including loss of privacy, supporting surveillance by both the state and corporations, undermining the democratic process, other kinds of automated attempts of behavior manipulation, and excessive consumerism with its attendant environmental costs. Turning to what could be done, we propose a co-development of regulation and technology, as well as the key roles that can be played by citizens and civil society organizations. The regulatory measures are intended to safeguard privacy, require true informed consent, and to foster interoperability (even among rival firms, nonprofit organizations, and others). We also identify key enabling technologies, including open source, APIs to support interoperability and portability, encryption, and peer-to-peer systems. Finally, we discuss the crucial role of ownership structures for these IT services and argue for an ecosystem approach as a counter narrative to surveillance capitalism.

Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) involve the misuse of any or several of a wide array of substances, such as alcohol, opioids, marijuana, and methamphetamine. SUDs are characterized by an inability to decrease use despite severe social, economic, and health-related consequences to the individual. A 2017 national survey identified that 1 in 12 US adults have or have had a substance use disorder. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that SUDs relating to alcohol, prescription opioids, and illicit drug use cost the United States over $520 billion annually due to crime, lost work productivity, and health care expenses. Most recently, the US Department of Health and Human Services has declared the national opioid crisis a public health emergency to address the growing number of opioid overdose deaths in the United States. In this interdisciplinary workshop, we explored how computational support - digital systems, algorithms, and sociotechnical approaches (which consider how technology and people interact as complex systems) - may enhance and enable innovative interventions for prevention, detection, treatment, and long-term recovery from SUDs. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored a two-day workshop titled "Computational Support for Substance Use Disorder Prevention, Detection, Treatment, and Recovery" on November 14-15, 2019 in Washington, DC. As outcomes from this visioning process, we identified three broad opportunity areas for computational support in the SUD context: 1. Detecting and mitigating risk of SUD relapse, 2. Establishing and empowering social support networks, and 3. Collecting and sharing data meaningfully across ecologies of formal and informal care.

It's difficult to see the ecological impact of IT when its benefits are so blindingly bright.

A large portion of the software side of our information technology infrastructure, including web search, email, social media, transportation information, and much more, is provided "free" to the end users, although the corporations that provide this are often enormously profitable. The business model involves customized advertising and behavior manipulation, powered by intensive gathering and cross-correlation of personal information. Significant other parts of our IT infrastructure use fees-for-service but still involve intensive information gathering and behavior manipulation. There are significant indirect costs of these business models, including loss of privacy, supporting surveillance by both corporations and the state, automated manipulations of behavior, undermining the democratic process, and consumerism with its attendant environmental costs. In a recent book, Shoshana Zuboff terms this "surveillance capitalism." Our primary focus in this essay is how we could develop new models for providing these services. We describe some intermediate steps toward those models: education, regulation, and resistance. Following that, we discuss a partial solution, involving for-profit corporations that provide these services without tracking personal information. Finally, we describe desired characteristics for more comprehensive solutions, and outline a range of such solutions for different portions of the IT infrastructure that more truly return control to the end users. A common feature of several is the use of highly decentralized storage of information (either on the end user's own personal devices or on small servers), a modular architecture and interface to allow for customization of what information is to be shared, and a distributed ledger mechanism for authentication.

While there is widespread recognition of the need to provide people with vision impairments (PVI) equitable access to cultural institutions such as art galleries, this is not easy. We present the results of a collaboration with a regional art gallery who wished to open their collection to PVIs in the local community. We describe a novel model that provides three different ways of accessing the gallery, depending upon visual acuity and mobility: virtual tours, self-guided tours and guided tours. As far as possible the model supports autonomous exploration by PVIs. It was informed by a value sensitive design exploration of the values and value conflicts of the primary stakeholders.

There are significant negative impacts from extracting, processing, maintaining, and ultimately disposing of the materials used to support information technology, as well as of producing the energy it uses, yet these negative impacts receive substantially less attention than discussion of the benefits or technical aspects of IT. This essay presents some ideas on the forces that either de-emphasize or even actively push against considering these impacts. They are grouped into three overarching categories: metaphor and utopian visions, economics, and disciplinary norms and practices of computer science. The essay concludes with some ideas for what might be done to counter these forces and increase the visibility of these impacts when appropriate, suggestions for further investigations, and a framing of these issues as a particular aspect of larger systemic and interlocking environmental, economic, and political problems.

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Lisa Nathan, Editor